Husbands Love Your Wives

In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves
his wife actually shows love for himself. No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as
Christ cares for the church. Ephesians 5:28-29 NLT
It is very significant that wives are not commanded to love their husbands. Given a reasonably
caring and thoughtful husband, an ordinary woman will not have trouble loving him. It is her
nature. Now she may therefore want to run his life for him (loving him as she does), but she will
not have difficulty loving him.
So what is the problem with men? If the temptation for women is to want to run people’s lives,
the temptation for men is to want to use people as objects in order to accomplish their goals. Men
are goal-oriented and women are people-oriented. Someone has said, correctly, I think, that men
are hunters and women are gatherers. What this means is that men are very prone to walk over
people on the way to that all-important “kill.” “Get it done” is our motto. But God – Father, Son,
and Spirit – says to us, “Wait just a minute! People are more important than accomplishments.”
We men are tempted to say, “Yeah, yeah,” and push on. But God insists, “Love your wives,” and
the term used is not the one for affection, but the one for the self-giving, self-denial that Jesus
manifests for all of us.
So the word for us men is to stop taking our wives for granted, to stop using them for the
achievement of our goals, and to start cherishing them as equal partners in the creation of godly
children and the making of the world a better place for human flourishing in the image of God.
Do we have differing roles to fill? Yes, we do, and those roles complement each other. But that
does not mean that either one is of lesser value than the other. It means both of us give ourselves
away for the other. For men giving ourselves away will look one way, and for women to give
themselves away will look another, but both are giving themselves away.